SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Today I’m talking with London Business School professor Julian Birkinshaw and with Jordan Cohen, a productivity expert with PA Consulting. He’s also a frequent contributor to hbr.org. Together they are the co-authors of the HBR article “Make Time for the Work That Matters.” Gentlemen, thanks both of you for joining us today.

JORDAN COHEN: Thank you, Sarah.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Thank you.

SARAH GREEN: So in order to figure out how knowledge workers could make more time for the important projects that never seem to get enough attention, you both started out by observing how they spend their time normally, in the normal course of the day. What you find? How are we all spending our time?

JORDAN COHEN: Right. We looked at 39 knowledge workers across 45 different companies, and these were highly educated and experienced managers and directors in large organizations. And it turns out they spend over 30% of their time doing desk work and almost 40% of their time in activities that can be characterized as managing across their organization. Now the interesting thing is that much of these two kind of large categories of activities, the workers themselves feel can either be easily delegated or outsourced and are somewhat tiresome to perform.

SARAH GREEN: Could you maybe just give us an example of what, concretely, some of those activities might be?

JORDAN COHEN: So we sat with these workers and asked them to open up their calendar and tell us what they did during the day. There was a whole range of things, from sitting in on a product meeting update to having management meetings or development meetings with their direct reports. In some cases, it’s spending time with customers.

SARAH GREEN: OK. So then you had these knowledge workers perform what was actually a fairly simple intervention in their schedules, and we’re going to get to what the intervention was in a minute. But first I’d just like to establish how effective it was. What was the impact? And how much time did they save?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So they were remarkably successful. They saved, on average, about eight hours a week. And what they saved mostly was their desk work, but also a significant number of meetings. And they saved their desk time, essentially, by mostly delegating to colleagues and subordinates and sometimes simply by just dropping work which was no longer needed. And one or two of them even tried, shall we say, outsourcing projects to third parties. So it was a great success. We were, quite honestly, a little bit surprised at how successful it was for some people to save kind of 15%, 20% of their time just through this one intervention.

SARAH GREEN: So that’s really appealing, I think, to most people. I think most of us would like to get, yeah, a full day back in our lives. So walk us through the exercise, the mechanics of the exercise you had them do.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Sure. I mean, I think that’s instructive here because a lot of this is the knowledge worker leading themselves. We first asked the participant to take their calendar and look forward for the next two weeks and identify the activities that they could most easily get out of, either not do the activity, delegate it, or outsource the activity. And these are largely things that they felt weren’t as important in the range of things that they had to do or things that they felt, I don’t know, maybe they would get less value out of.

So we then asked them to take a log, establish a log, and for that those next two weeks list the activity that they are targeting, list why it was chosen, how they’re actually going to get out of it, and importantly, what they were going to do with the freed up time. At the end of each week, each participant went back to their log and essentially tracked what happened to that activity, how much time they saved, and what they did instead.

SARAH GREEN: So this is really interesting, and I want to focus more on some of those low-value tasks and how to identify them. And I know you’re building out an assessment on hbr.org if people want to try something more interactive for themselves. But just to get us started here, what are the kinds of questions people should be asking about their tasks to know whether they’re truly important?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: I think it’s easy to convince yourself that every task that you do is important. Otherwise it wouldn’t have found its way into your diary in the first place. So you’ve got to ask yourself some slightly, sort of, sharper questions than you’d usually do. So we focused in on four sort of diagnostic questions.

One is, how valuable is this, really? Is this something which contributes in any meaningful way to the overall success of your department or your operation or your organization? Secondly, to what extent could you actually get out of it? Imagine there’s a family emergency, imagine you arrive at work two or three hours late. What of the activities in your diary could you actually bump to another day or indeed get out of altogether? And of course, there were many of those.

The third one was essentially a question about, do you get any personal value out of doing this? In other words, imagine you’re financially independent. Imagine you don’t actually have to go to work. Are there activities that you would actually continue to do, or would you jettison most of them? This is important because obviously, we tend to do work better if it’s stuff that we actually, to some degree, enjoy.

And then the final one is the question about whether this could be delegated. So you imagine you’ve been put onto another project and you’ve got to delegate a bunch of tasks. Go through each one and say, is this something that somebody else could do even 80% as well as I could? Or is it something that really, frankly, nobody else could do? And again, that sharpens up our analysis as to whether these are things which really have to be done by us or not.

So each of those four questions obviously gets at a slightly different angle. Collectively, what they do is give you a way of prioritizing which of the tasks which would be the most likely to be taken away without doing any damage.

SARAH GREEN: So I’m sort of obsessed with the literature around personal productivity, and I know that these are the kinds of things I’m supposed to be doing. And yet, I find it difficult, and I think most people find it difficult, just based on the appetite HBR has from its readers and for this kind of content. Could we just talk about some of the barriers? I mean, why, for smart people, is this so difficult?

JORDAN COHEN: Right. Well, it sounds simple, but I think there’s actually a lot going on here. I think, first, at maybe the most macroscopic level, there tends not to be an organizational any kind of one executive that is responsible for making sure employees are as effective as possible and have the tools and the equipment and the space they need to get their work done. Those executives tend to have responsibilities on an organizational level or an organizational unit level. Therefore, the types of solutions that they build tend to be organizational solutions or business units solutions, and less so focused on the worker.

I think the second thing that’s going on here is, organizations tend to pull together a lot of disciplines or functions in teams in order to get things done. And this takes a fair amount of coordination. And with coordination comes coordination costs. Now if companies don’t have a view on employee productivity, those coordination costs are going to get high. It’s not going to be visible, and all of a sudden, people spending a lot of time coordinating and less time actually doing some of the work.

And then finally, I would say for the individual knowledge worker, I think this shows up as, I have a lot of stuff to do. And I have many initiatives in teams and projects to participate in. And then when you throw on top of that all the new tools and technologies which generate more data and more information, kind of the volume of work or the volume of work that needs to get done in order to get to work kind of just grows exponentially. So it tends to be a lot to do.

It requires coordination and communication that organizations tend not to have a lens on or metrics to watch and monitor and improve. But we are starting to see attempts at getting at this productivity issue, whether it’s at, I don’t know, a systemic level, maybe like some of the work I did at Pfizer, or even at a policy level. Companies are trying things out and recognizing there’s a problem.

Just last week, Ferrari announced they are making a change to the way their employees communicate with each other. And they’re putting a limit on how many people they can forward an email to, all right. So just imagine that. You have to now, at Ferrari, choose which three people you want to forward an email to, and it stops there. And they’re trying to get people to talk to each other, not just forward an email.

And then, I don’t know, I guess a month ago we saw Yahoo making a policy change, a work away from the office policy, in an attempt to get at more productivity. So I think there’s some attention being paid. And our study shows that, I think, there’s real benefit to addressing this problem.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Can I just add one much more sort of personal barrier, which is we all creatures of habit. And whether you’re trying to lose weight or whether you’re trying to get fit or whether you’re trying to just change what you do on a day to day basis, it’s really hard to do.

So one of the parts of our methodology, which we kind of hopped over a little bit, is people had to not just write down what they were going to do in terms of time savings, but they had to verbally commit to us. They actually had to look us in the eye and say, I am going to do this. And we discovered that that’s actually a kind of important piece.

So if you’re going to take part of this exercise, make sure that you sit down with your boss or a colleague and tell them that you’re going to do this time savings thing. Otherwise, you just fall straight back into old habits.

SARAH GREEN: Well, and I suppose if we are honest with ourselves and sort of look into our heart of hearts, we might see that maybe there’s some element of us that kind of likes being really busy and needed by our coworkers. So maybe there’s some psychological barrier there, too.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Personally, I think it we say we don’t like going to meetings, but actually, there’s an enormous social component to meetings. And we say we don’t like email. But actually, we actually get some sort of bizarre gratification from having a full email inbox, because it means that lots of people are trying to get our attention. So we aren’t always entirely honest with ourselves in terms of how we spend our time. I think that’s correct.

SARAH GREEN: I like your description of it as a bizarre gratification. Yes, very bizarre.

[LAUGHTER]

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Yep. Agreed.

SARAH GREEN: So if we can get past some of these barriers and do the exercise and really commit to making the change and to trying to save that 20% of our time, what about the other piece of it, the piece that’s about adding more high value work in place of the time that we’ve saved? What kind of activities should we put into that new time? And what’s most effective?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So one of the people we studied– and her name is mentioned in the article, Lotta Lehtonen– and she works at If, which is a Sweden-based insurance company, one of the biggest insurance companies in northern Europe. And very briefly, she sat down with her Jorgen Johansson. They looked for ways of saving some time, and he was very helpful in terms of freeing up some of her time and allowing her some free time.

And kind of the quid pro quo was she would actively use that spent time essentially becoming a more effective coach with her team. She had a team of 20 people who sit on the phone, calling up clients, trying to encourage them to buy more insurance. So this is kind of tough work, and it’s the sort of work where a boss who’s going to help you really makes a difference. So they agreed that she would focus more of her time on helping her people as a one to one coach and really try to provide a bit more attention to them and she of the team.

Over a three week period, it was phenomenally successful. And we actually measured not just whether her people were happier as a result of this, which they were, but we even measured their productivity. And of course, in essentially a call center environment, you can absolutely measure productivity in terms of number of cross-sales you make. And what they discovered was they got a 5% uplift in overall sales in this group over the three week period.

And then when you go underneath the surface of that, what they discovered was that the lowest performers dramatically improved their performance because she was able to basically work with him and bring them up to more or less the level of the median. So the higher performers were already high performers and they continued to be high performers. But it really, really helped them to get the lower performers up to a good level.

So that’s a very, very tangible example of spending time on value-added stuff. Her team loved the fact that she was spending more time with them. And of course the organization didn’t miss the fact that she wasn’t spending time on a bunch of meetings and filling in spreadsheets.

JORDAN COHEN: That’s a great example. I would also add, if you step back a bit and think about what’s really happening in here with an agreement to hire someone and ask them to do some work, you’re actually hiring somebody– and knowledge workers tend to have to consume resources any way to get their work done, whether they need to buy data or use other resources within the organization. And more often than not, I see organizations kind of directing and telling their knowledge workers what to do and how to work.

My feeling here is the more you do that, the more you remove the ability for the knowledge worker to use their judgment. And in the end, I believe that that’s what companies are really hiring folks to do, is to kind of come in and, no matter what their experience base is at that moment, they’re going to get confronted with situations that are new, that might be similar to other situations, situations that they’ve seen in the past, but it’s a different context. And they’re going to need to use their judgment.

And in this particular case, it’s my feeling that if, all of a sudden, you find you’ve got now two hours a day freed up, having the company, the boss, or the management team dictate where the knowledge worker needs to spend their time probably isn’t what’s going to add the most value. My sense is in an organization where there are clear objectives and people know their roles and understand where they’re going and what they have to accomplish that year, with a quick conversation with your supervisor, a knowledge worker can determine for themselves where the best bang for the buck is.

This whole kind of experiment here which yielded these results relies on giving the knowledge worker some autonomy to make those decisions. And my sense is you could give that knowledge worker autonomy, they tend to do the right thing.

SARAH GREEN: Well, Jordan and Julian, thank you both so much for talking with us today.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

JORDAN COHEN: Thank you, Sarah. It was a pleasure being with you today.

SARAH GREEN: That was Jordan Cohen and Julian Birkinshaw. For more, including the article and the interactive assessment, visit hbr.org.

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